In the red light district’s production of Woyzeck, the director’s concept completely overwhelms the text. If you don’t already know the play or read the excellent programme notes beforehand, you may very well be puzzled as to what actually is happening on stage. This is quite a pity since the play, while standard repertory in Europe, is so seldom staged in North America.

When Georg Büchner died in 1837 at the age of 23, his Woyzeck was just a series of fragmentary scenes concerning the true story of an impoverished soldier, given to hallucinations, who killed the woman he lived with. Büchner’s insight was to suggest that Woyzeck had gone mad in trying to make sense of a world that itself was mad. Thus, Büchner was thinking along the lines of Expressionism and Absurdism nearly a hundred years before these movements existed, and, indeed, Woyzeck was not staged until 1913. It has since inspired, among others, Alban Berg’s great opera in 1925 and a film by Werner Herzog in 1979.

In this staging director Ted Witzel takes the play’s short circus scene and makes it the production’s overriding concept. Not only is a one-ring circus the setting but all the scenes becomes circus acts. The trouble is that all the juggling, clowning, stilt-walking, singing, dancing and animal imitations inevitably distract from what the characters are saying. It would help if the actors projected and enunciated, but mostly they do not. What Lauren Gillis says as Marie, Woyzeck’s beloved, is often indecipherable. The key scene in which Woyzeck (Reid Linforth) shaves the Captain (Marcel Dragonieri), Witzel turns into a knife-throwing act with Woyzeck hurling the knives. The sight of razor on throat ought to prefigure Woyzeck’s stabbing of Marie, but here the knifeless Woyzeck somehow “kills” Marie while standing several feet away from her.

Because Witzel further fragments the text by repeating sections and assigning speeches from one character to another, none of the characters’ relationships are clear. You would never know that it is Marie’s affair with the Drum Major (Brandon Hackett) that pushes Woyzeck over the edge because the two never meet. We ought witness the tragic process in which circumstances gradually overwhelm the basically moral Woyzeck so that he kills what he loves most, but here, Witzel’s Woyzeck is already fully mad from the start. Linforth has impressive talent and could certainly show us this process and not just the outcome. Unfortunately, Witzel treats the actors as puppets enacting his own game rather than Büchner’s play.